Company representatives and management will outright lie to you about the things they claim the company values. Things like "people come first", "we work hard and play hard", "work/life balance is crucial" and "code maintenance is important". If you want to find out what a company actually values, pay attention to what it incentivizes, and also where it deploys it's leukocytes. Often, people who work for a company assume the company values some concept or principal we shall call "X". In reality, the company doesn't actually value X. Oftentimes the company could not care less about X or even disdains X. But: they value VALUING X! (Go ahead and read that twice). The meta-valuing of things often produces a much different, often opposite result on the ground than the valuing of things - an important distinction.
Also real company values are things that have reasonable opposites, i.e. things that help you make a choice. Ideally, they even make this explicit.
Example: We value having fun at work over sense of duty. Or we value good customer experience over high efficiency.
In those cases, it's clear that something generally good (sense of duty, high efficiency) is being rejected in favour of something else the company values.
Examples of meaningless values are things like "integrity" or "constant improvement" where it's hard to imagine anyone wanting the opposite. Unless you can imagine a competitor picking as a company value "we're committed to maintaining the status quo and never improving" then "constant improvement" is not a good guiding principle for you. It's just common sense!
The very worst are the ones that pick opposites and value both. Like "quantity and quality" or more subtly "independence and teamwork", "research and intuition".
